The Cardiff Giant: a Giant Hoax

Whose stone face refuses,
declines the offer to crumble
under the weight of the earth

They might be giants
whose stony face dreams with us,
putting the magic in our dreams

Who of us can mutely speak
merely by the fixed glance?
Could the eons of time have deceived us?

Who is this giant from the earth...he opines...
what tales do you hold?

Like out of rock you chisel
our undreaming brains
with the chisel of our wonderment,
our astonishment

They might be giants...
we dream of the heights you reach

George Hull was an enterprising man who wasn't afraid of stirring up controversy to earn a buck. His Binghamton, New York tobacco shop was not paying his bills so he decided to have some fun and stir up upstate New York. The story has been passed down that a preacher argued with him over whether the Bible should be taken literally...according to the Genesis in the Bible there was a line stating that giants were walking the earth to paraphrase the particular passage. Hull proceeded to Iowa--Fort Dodge, Iowa--where he found a deposit of gypsum which would suit stone cutters since the rock was soft and malleable enough to be carved. He hired a crew to unearth a 3 ton twelve-foot long piece of gypsum. With considerable effort he had the block of stone hauled some 40 miles to a railroad depot where he had the block of stone loaded on a train and headed to Chicago. Chicago was where he hired stone cutters to carve the statue who amusingly carved the face of George Hull on the statue. They treated the finished statue with acid and ink...the finished statue was veined with the ink. Soft rock will sometime absorb applied and produce veining. The finished statue was of a naked, recumbent (lying down) "giant"...the interpretation of his appearance was entirely up to the imagination since it was hypothesized the "Cardiff Giant" was either a petrified man or possibly a statue of a man from a lost civilization. It was hypothesized it was the remains of a giant frozen in his death throes. As is customary in hoaxes the curious onlookers are invited to use their imagination

The statue was on its way to its new home on a farm in Cardiff, New York where a relative of his agreed to play along for one fourth the profits of the price of admission of the expected spectators. The giant was buried on William Newell's farm in upstate New York and it was left in the ground for a year for the stir to die down from him transporting the huge item into Cardiff initially. The "discovery" of the giant was planned by having a well dug on Newell's property...the well diggers "found" the statue as they dug for water and soon the hoax was on. The "discovery" was followed by a display of the giant on Newell's property under a tent. The 50-cent admission price more than covered the cost of perpetrating the hoax. At one point P.T. Barnum offered a large sum of money to "rent" the giant for three months. By early 1870 a Yale professor--Othniel C. Marsh-- investigated the statue and announced it to be a hoax. The perpetrators of the hoax had "surmised" loudly the giant was either a petrified giant man or a stone statue from a previous civilization. Professor Marsh found fresh chisel marks left by the stone cutters however.

Today, in 2011, the Cardiff Giant sits in the Farmers Museum in Cooperstown, New York not far from the baseball museum which honors the sport of professional baseball. There is a replica of the Cardiff Giant in the Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Detroit.

Resources:
www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive
www.marvin3m.com